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BY 



H. AUGUSTUS SMITH. 




AMERICAN NATIONALITY. 



THANKSGIVING SERMON, 



PREACHED AT THE 



FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 

MANTUA, 
NOVEMBER 24, 1864, 



H. AUGUSTUS SMITH, 

PASTOR. 



[published by request 




PHILADELPHIA: 

SHERMAN & CO., PRINTERS. 

1864. 



\dA 



SERMON. 



"And I will make of thee a great nation." — Genesis 12 : 2. 

Such was God's promise to Abraham. The world 
of that day was full of the fame of the Tower of Babel, 
symbol of an empire founded exclusively in the ambi- 
tion and selfishness of men. Such an empire could 
not stand ; without moral cohesion, it fell into frag- 
ments, and was scattered over the face of the whole 
earth. Then God selected Abraham from Ur of the 
Chaldees, as if to show the world what a true nation 
ought to be. " Behold, / will make of thee a great 
nation." Those huge Babels of antiquity were but 
swarms of men, clustering in mighty aggregates, but 
with no stirring of a diviner life, no sentiment of na- 
tionality, fine, strong, imperial, breathing through 
their multitudes. They were a godless, loveless, joint- 
stock company, — a " swarm of bees hiving their ho- 
ney ;" a " herd of cattle chewing their cud." Till the 
beast's heart was taken away and the man's heart 
given, there could be no organic life, erecting the na- 



tion's manhood, and knitting all its parts into the 
unity of magnificent membership. Unless God be in 
a nation's life, it will break up and crumble into dust 
as Babel did. This God taught xVbraham. Jehovah 
is the Builder of nations. By Him, kings reign and 
princes decree justice. There is no history where God 
works not in the life of nations. Egypt, Babylon, 
Assyria, are but the vast morasses and stagnant pools 
through which the swift, bright current of Jewish life 
runs on through openings of the old forest, gleaming 
through intervale here and there, till it spreads out at 
last into the clear daylight of history. 

This is the truth that God is teaching us to-day. 
Are we building the fabric of our State in harmony 
with God's eternal laws, laying its granitic walls so 
deep that neither earthquake nor frost can reach them? 
While the storm and stress of God's judgments are 
dashing on our walls, and the freshets of revolution go 
roaring past, and all the torrents of the time are 
baring our foundations to the public eye, it becomes us 
to inquire whether these substructures are on the rock 
of God's eternal Truth and Equitj^ We go back 
again in thought, to the scenes of the dedication day, 
when our fathers reared this holy and beautiful city 
of our liberties, with tears, and anthems, and thanks- 
givings. We witness again the rock hewn from the 
mountain side, and the "Cyclopean foundation" laid, 
and the great arches of stone upreared, and the turrets 
and the domes uplifted, whose towering and steadfast 



height they fondly dreamed might glitter through the 
sunsets of a thousand years. We gaze upon this magni- 
ficent original huilded by the fathers — builded of their 
thought, their valor, their manhood, their great religi- 
ous trust, and we ask ourselves, will it endure ? Will 
it outlast the faction, and the rage, and the madness 
of this hour, in which the very stars seem shooting 
from their spheres, and the foundations of the earth 
are out of course ? 

Let us then go reverently down, and examine once 
more these foundation-truths on which our fathers 
reared their stately system, stately and eternal, as they 
hoped, beneath whose portals the latest generations 
might come up to the glad inheritance of this social 
life. 

My friends, we believe those foundations are sure. 
We believe Almighty Providence is pre-engaged to 
make this a truly great nation. He who kept this 
western world for ages locked in the silence of the 
seas, till the Printing-press and the Reformation had 
" scattered the flying rear of mediaeval darkness," and 
then planted the finest wheat of three kingdoms in 
the vast belt of this temperate zone, must have de- 
signed through all these centuries of foresight, to 
found a splendid nationality upon this hemisphere, 
and to give our eagle, like that of the prophet, the 
cedars of Lebanon, and the " topmost branches of the 
cedar to plant by his great waters." We are the latest 



offspring of history, and wc know what Bif^hop Berke- 
ley simg one hundred years ago : 

" Westward, the course of empire takes its way, 
The four 6rst acts already past ; 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day, — 
Time's noblest offspring is the last." 

But if this vision is to be fulfilled, we must study 
and understand our duties as members of this great 
Republic. We must study our age, its features and 
characteristics. We cannot exjject to "blunder into 
greatness," 

Every nation has ix character — some distinctive type 
of being more or less splendid and remarlxaljle, that 
may be plainly read. It must bear some stamp of its 
origin. Every great nation must be able to point 
back to an authentic race of founders — a heroic age 
and a heroic race of ancestry. Torn from its begin- 
nings, every State is weak and fragmentary ; it takes 
hold on nothing in the past, and grasps nothing in the 
future through which its destinies may be unfolded 
and fulfilled. There must be the old traditions sing- 
ing through its history forever, like 

"The wind among the branches, 
Like the rushing of the rivers 
Through their palisades of pine trees j 
Like the thunder in the mountains, 
Whose innumerable echoes. 
Flap like eagles in their eyries." 



The forms of our departed ancestry must walk upon 
the shore beyond the river, lighting us to deeds of 
greatness, and shedding the " romance of time" upon 
our history. We must accept our birthright, we must 
claim our inheritance. Their great lives must incite us 
to noble deeds, and we must feel their inspiration in 
the beating of our hearts. Now, as we develop that 
splendid germ of origin into the mellowed and grander 
traits of national maturity, we embody what is called 
a national existence — a Idstory. It is not the aggre- 
gate of seas and continents, nor the falling, for so many 
hundred years, of the rain and the sunshine on its soil, 
that erects the spirit of a nation, gives it type and 
character, and sets the stars of glory on its front. The 
true glory of a State is that it is the exponent of 
the national mind. It is builded up on the will, the 
reason, the veneration of the people -, ideas of liberty 
and law and justice working in the universal heart ; 
great names and days and memories, all mingling in 
the common life of the people, and tinging all its con- 
tributions to humanity and thought and progress. 
Such are the elements of a State. High aims, com- 
manding traits of character, "plain living and high 
thinking," — these are the elements that harden into 
the bone and symmetry of a true national life. Every 
State is the incarnation of a thought, a purpose, an 
idea, which warms and burns in all its history, its 
industry, its trade, its art, its science, its libraries, its 
architecture; a sentiment that declares itself in bat- 



ties, in voices of orators and poets, and from the hal- 
lowed altars of religion. And so we rightl}' speak of 
the Roman mind, the Grecian mind, the Oriental 
mind, the Kiir()})e;ni mind, the Ainei'ican mind. 

Are there, then, endjodied in our history, traits and 
features of distinctive nationality ? 

What are those elements ? 

1. The first condition of a great nation is extent of 
territory. This was distinctly intimated to Abraham 
when God said, " Unto thy seed will I give this land." 
Every rood of earth upon this globe belongs to God, 
and He bestows it where He pleases, as Paul told the 
Athenians. He "hath determined the times before 
appointed for all nations, and the bounds of their 
habitation, that they might seek after the Lord and 
find Him." There was a Providence in preparing 
Palestine for the Hebrew nation. There was a Provi- 
dence in preparing this continent for us. How strik- 
ingly, how remarkably providential, when we reflect 
upon it! The features and scenery of a continent 
largely determine the character of its people. In the 
luxurious East there are warm skies, and balmy airs, 
and exuberant soils. " Every blast shakes spices from 
the leaves, and every month drops fruits upon the 
ground." And the features of that clime are re- 
flected in an indolent, effeminate, and timorous race of 
men, dreaming away existence, and musing on destiny 
and the stars. Our nation's infancy was In-aced and 
cradled in a sterner theatre. They l(K)ked around on 



austere skies, and iced and granite-gleaming hills, on 
which the lightning gleamed innocuous ; " nothing 
above them but the heavens, and that God who sits 
above the heavens." But greatness was sown, and 
souls were ripened on that reluctant soil; character 
was framed, granitic, adamantine. To emj)loy an il- 
lustration of their own, " Puritanism was planted in 
the region of storms, and there it grew. Swayed this 
way and that by a whirlwind of blasts, all adverse, 
it sent down its roots below frost, or drought, or the 
bed of the avalanche ; its trunk went up erect, gnarled, 
seamed, not riven by the bolt ; the evergreen enfolded 
its branches ; its blossom was like to that ensanguined 
flower inscribed with woe." Had they found the wil- 
derness all cleared away, and smiling farms and vil- 
lages, and free schools and churches, they would never 
have developed that iron quality of heroism which 
made them, in the words of Milton, " a right pious, 
right honest, right holy nation." Thus were laid the 
foundations of the mind and character of Puritanism. 
And then mark the Providence of God in giving a 
mighty continent to their descendants. Unroll the 
map of our domain as it stretches from the rock of 
Plymouth and the peninsula of Jamestown to the 
Pacific. Follow it unrolling through twenty parallels 
of latitude and fifty of longitude, outward beyond 
the imperial Valley of the West and the Father of 
Waters ; beyond the portals of the Rocky Mountains 
to the great " tranquil sea ;" the tides of our empire 



10 



setting resistlessly on towards the setting sun. And 
then see how this vast expanse of territoiy, broader 
than tlie Athxntic, carries in its sweep the climates 
and productions of every surface of the globe. Pine 
forests, grand as those which shag the steeps of Nor- 
way ; wheat-fields more opulent than those of Pohnid ; 
fields of rice and cotton as exuberant as those of India 
and the Valley of the Nile. And then witness how 
this boundless area, though vast as that of Asia, is not 
like that, — a continent in repose. All its symbols are 
of life and action. It has mountain elevations, and 
1 jroad and rapid rivers, tlie silver paths of trade, cours- 
ing down its valleys. Its coast-lines are washed by 
the waters of two oceans, and for away to the north 
are vast inland lakes, like congregated seas, their dash- 
ing waves inspiring with enterprise and freedom, while 
they open their gates to the commerce of the remotest 
North. Such a continent as this, with all its mighty 
symbols of energy and action, was surel}?- framed by 
the Creator for a magnificent and imperial nationality ; 
broad, rapid, majestic, as the rivers of the land; such 
a peo})le as history has never known. 

And this, too, casts the features of our destiny, and 
makes us inevitably one nation. While Europe, as a 
foreigner once said, is shaped like the outside of a 
l)owl, so that all runs off, this continent is shaped like 
the inside, so that all runs to the centre. God meant 
this iiiiti(m to l)e one. Until you can cut the Ijack- 
boiie of the Alleghanies, and tie up the arteries of the 



11 



Mississippi and Missouri, you can never halve this 
nation into a political North and South. It is the 
edict of God, sculptured in all the lines of our conti- 
nent. This the South saw in the beginning, and 
they hoped to grasp the preponderance of empire by 
drawing the West into their confederacy, and thus 
compelling the subjection of the Northeast. Said Hon. 
Robert H. Smith, of Alabama, in a speech at Mobile 
in 1861, " I earnestly hope that not only will the 
kindred States join us, but abide in confidence that 
some of the great Northwestern States, watered by the 
Mississippi, will be drawn by the strong current of 
that mighty river, and by the laws of trade, to swell the 
number and power of this confederation, and that we 
shall receive them on such terms as we ourselves may 
prescribe, and in doing so, grasp the power of empire on 
this continent^ That tells the real truth. The ques- 
tion was, which power should hold this belt of the 
continent ; and such was their golden dream of sove- 
reignty, — to control the current of our navigable rivers, 
to garrison the Isthmus, to hold with forts and cannon 
the entire Gulf coast, and by seizing our arsenals, and 
mints, and custom-houses, to bankrupt the Union, and 
so erect a magnificent Gulf empire, which should rule 
the continent forever. This dream has proved but the 
" baseless fabric of a vision," but the grand features of 
our national unity, graven by God's finger on this con- 
tinent, still remain as distinct and bright as before the 
war began. 



12 



Aud now God is clearing it all up to bo the inheri- 
tance of freedom. As He drove the Canaanites from 
before the children of Abraham, and gave them Pales- 
tine in which to found the lleJirew nationality, so 
to-day he is driving before the avenging arms of the 
Republic, those heathen myrmidons whose god is 
slavery, and giving back to freedom its whole inheri- 
tance. Unroll your map and see what has been done. 
Once the symbol of rebellion floated over one million 
six hundred and fiftj'-three thousand square miles. 
"We have recovered hy force of arms nearly four-fifths 
of that territor}'. Once it flaunted its accursed domina- 
tion over twelve millions of the Southern population. 
It now overshadows about four millions. And still 
the work goes on. We are reclaiming the continent 
step by step, and we are bound to round it to the Gulf 
as the home of freedom. For the first time now that 
Southern land is emerging into history. Borne down 
by the accursed bigotry of the slave sj'stem, it had 
never lifted its head as a moral influence and power 
among the civilizations of the world. But now the 
waters of darkness are receding, as if they heard God's 
voice summoning a whole people to civil and religious 
liljert3\ And as its glad mountains emerge into the 
light of this new era, and its broad and fertile fields 
are reclaimed to freedom, it is like the emerging of a 
new creation out of darkness and the deep. Thus will 
the Great Republic, I'oundetl iu its vast circumference 



13 



by the wash of miglity seas, resemble the poet's de- 
scription of the buckler of Achilles : 

" Now the broad shield complete, the artist crowned 
With his last hand, and poured the ocean round ; 
In living silver seemed the waves to roll. 
And beat the buckler's verge, and bound the whole." 

Fill this empire of industry with free institutions, 
make our civilization homogeneous, and there is no 
danger that the vastness of our territory will overcome 
its vehement centripetal cohesion. " Did the dis- 
covery of Neptune impair the stability of the solar 
system ?" Make our institutions homogeneous, let the 
public sentiment gravitate toward law and liberty, 
and you frame a nation for perpetuity, — unchangeable, 
indestructible, till the heavens be no more. 

2. This brings to our review another of those founda- 
tion-truths on which our nationality is reared, and 
which the torrents of revolution are laying bare to the 
eye, — I mean the public sentiment of Law, the idea 
of Justice. The pressure of the time is forcing us to 
ponder more earnestly these fundamental forms of law 
and government, which are the first conditions of 
liberty, A great equity lawyer has declared, that 
"ever since the Revolution of 1688, law has been the 
basis of public liberty." It is the cohesive power in 
the State. Without that golden sovereignty of law, 
" whose seat is the bosom of God, whose voice is the 
harmony of the world," no nation can exist. How 



14 



mj'sterious are its subtle bonds, light as air, yet strong 
as destiny, which encircle our very cradles and inter- 
weave the intercourse of man with man ! We did 
not will it into existence. It is independent of our 
action or our thought. But we can no more escape it 
than we can leap from the planet. It comes down to 
us invested with the sacredness of iilniiemorial ages, 
a vast and multiform aggregate of wisdom, running 
back through Saxon, Roman, Grecian jurisprudence — 
beyond the Pyramids, beyond the Flood — to its mysteri- 
ous sources in the primeval East. It has come down 
to us on the bosom of the ages; surviving revolutions, 
reforms, the cycles of opinion, the rare and distant 
days of history ; surviving dynasties and conquests, 
and the warring interests and passions of the world ; 
the builder of a thousand States, the " guardian or 
avenging angel" of a hundred generations. Such is 
the invisible, but venerable and omnipresent, majesty 
of law ; the finest expression and spirit of the ages ; 
the authoritative voice of the moral sentiment of all 
mankind. And so it passes into the mind and heart 
of every people that is truly great. It builds up to a 
durable glory the fabric of the State. Let the au- 
thoritative whisper of its higher, grander reason be 
heard, curbing the fitful passions of the multitude, 
speaking as with the voice of God to them, and you 
have a principle of moral cohesion running through 
the life of the undying State, binding its Past, and 
Present, and Future, for generations together, so long 



15 



as the sun and moon endure. This is what our fothers 
felt when they laid so deep in law the foundations of 
our national system. If to build States be, as Bacon 
declares, the grandest work of man, how should we 
venerate the Founders who builded so wisely this 
fabric of constitutional liberty ? They were read in all 
the wisdom of the past. That code of freedom which 
they brought in the May-Flower and Arabella, was 
silently built up from the wisdom of the ages ; from 
the golden days of Greece, and Italy, and Geneva ; 
from the customs of the Germans, transplanted from 
the Elbe and the Eyder into the councils of Saxon 
England ; from the plains of Runnymede ; from the 
great thinkers and statesmen of the English Revolu- 
tion ; " from the cloud of witnesses of all the ages to 
the reality and the rightfulness of human freedom." 
Out of all this, the refined and blended sentiment and 
reason of all civilization and all humanity, the Foun- 
ders builded up their adamantine fabric of the State. 
But now, in the slow process of time, slavery, itself 
at war with the whole spirit of the Constitution ; at 
war with every law of God's ordaining, natural or re- 
vealed ; at war with all the world's enlightened senti- 
ment of justice ; slavery had been nursing up a race 
of men struck through and through with the virus of 
bitter hostility to every sentiment of liberty that rang 
in the clauses of our Constitution. Men, trained up 
from their very birth to lawless and irresponsible 
power, taking counsel but from their baser passions ; 



16 



nu'ii melted in sensualit}'. and who never liad an aim, 
an aspiration, or a loyal purpose since " the day their 
mothers looked into their cradles;" these men, the 
moment their selfish instincts were aroused, forswore 
the holiest obligations that should have bound them 
to the memory of their fathers, and wheeled out of the 
Union. What else could you have expected? What 
sense of the sanctity and force of law was to Ijc antici- 
pated in a race of men, whose moral sense of justice 
and obligation had been eaten out hy the canker curse 
of slaverj^ ? Law has no sanctions in that community, 
from which all sense of justice and humanity and 
liunuin rights has died away. Slavery has h6ney- 
combed into ruin the very foundations of government 
in the South. Those men are perjured, every one of 
them. They have tram})led under their feet the holiest 
sanctions that should have pledged them to the Union. 
They have abrogated their sworn oath of fealty and 
loyalty to the Constitution and the Laws. 

The true doctrine of State Rights was forever settled 
in the adoption of the Constitution. " There was no 
reservation" (says Justice Story), " of any right on the 
part of any State to dissolve its connection, or to ab- 
rogate its assent, or to suspend the operation of the 
Constitution as to itself" " The great and fundamen- 
tal defect of the Confederation of 1781" (says Chan- 
cellor Kent), "which led to its eventual overthrow, 
was that, in imitation of all other confederacies, it car- 
ried the decrees of the Federal Council to the States 



17 



in their sovereign capacity. The Constitution of 
1787 (ratified by the people at hirge), saved us from 
ruin and degradation, by hiying the foundations of the 
fabric of our national polity, where alone they ought 
to be laid, on the broad consent of the people." 

And now, I repeat, that slavery has fastened upon 
that Southern race, with all their other crimes, the 
crime of perjury. This present Rebellion, in its very 
cradle of treason, in its very swaddling-bands and 
cradle-wrappings, has been clad with perjury as with 
a garment. And now what is the result of all this ? 
They have appealed to the sword ; they have thrown 
down the gauntlet, and we have taken it up and hurled 
it back, clear over the Cotton States, and down into 
the Gulf And we tell them now — the last election 
has told them in tones of thunder — that we mean to 
put this thing forever out of the way of troubling our 
peace hereafter. We cannot afford to run that risk 
again. " Out of this nettle, danger," we mean to 
" pluck the flower, safety." We are going right down 
to the root of the difficulty. We do not mean to post- 
pone these issues to another generation, but, by the 
grace of God, will meet this heresy so effectually, that 
never a ghost of it shall rise to haunt posterity. The 
Union meant liberty in '7G, and shall now, all the way 
down to the Gulf The stress of our nation's agony 
is bringing home to the conscience of all, the saying 
of a Revolutionary patriot and statesman, that " as in 
the earthly Court of Chancery, so in the Court of 



18 



Heaven it will ])e rouiul. that if we ask e(|uity we 
must do equity." And now, when the winds blow 
a'.id the rains descend, and the nation's bark is scud- 
din^u' throuLih waters l)laek as ink, and the lee shore, 
edjied with loam, thunders under her stern, there are 
a few who would ha\e us east overboard compass, 
sextant, and ehronoineter, in order to save the freight; 
but the great nation has proved itself wiser than that. 
We will hold on to principle, and over with the freight 
if need be, assured that thus the good old ship will 
weather the storm at last. We are being schooled, in 
the Providence of God, back into a recognition of first 
principles. We very well know what spirit has aimed 
this bloAv at our national life. And now we are drift- 
ing into the open sea. The Union means justice. That 
was the true utterance of the Stars and Stripes ; that 
was the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. 
And we will inscribe that sentiment on every North- 
ern bayonet, and baptize every cannon with its " Holi- 
ness to the Lord." We will take the thunderbolt as 
God does, to lift up the humble, and abase the proud, 
and execute justice between man and man. We will 
make this sentiment broad as our continent, compre- 
hensive ^ om' liberties. And with it we will grapple 
the Union together as with hooks of steel, from the 
Gulf to the frozen Pole ! 

o. For this has come to be at last the moral senti- 
ment of the nation. It is the pure tone of this that 
vil)rat<'s in oui* common love for countrv. Patriotism 



19 



springs up along with constitutional liljertj and re\er- 
encG for law. Do you wonder that there is no pa- 
triotism, no tide ot American feeling at the South? 
Patriotism is a moral sentiment, chastened by law, 
and nurtured by the sweet spirit of liljerty. It begins, 
we know not how, with the fii-st smell of earth ; with 
the beatings of the heart of childhood; with the old well 
and willow-tree ; the rock and stream by the cottage- 
door ; the smell of blossoms, and the note of the robin 
in the spring; the huckleberry pasture whence the 
cows came home at evening ; the spire of the old meet- 
ing-house amid its immemorial elms, and the church- 
yard in the wood, where childhood played with bro- 
thers and sisters now " resting in early graves ;" the 
old hearthstone, with its memories of father and mother ; 
the open Bible, and the counsels of the aged : all these 
first fashion to our minds the reality and the ideal of 
country. And then as life widens, there comes to be 
a reverence for the State as such ; for that inviolable 
sauctity of law which entwines its securities around 
the roof-tree, its cradles of infancy, its ashes of the 
dead. And then there is blended with the fuller life 
of the man, the song of the old traditions ; the heroes, 
the patriots, the battles lost and won, the legends of 
the Revolution, all swell the tide of national feeling 
in the breast of the true citizen. And then, if besides 
these sweet stimulations of the home and the fireside, 
there be added the " austere glory of suffering" in his 
eountrj^'s cause, the tide of his patriotism will run 



20 



deeper and fuller. We value most our liberties when 
we have fought to secure them. So was it with the 
Founders of our State. They loved this land, its skies 
and its waters, and the everlasting hills of its freedom ; 
for these had all been consecrated by the glory of a 
common suffering in a common cause. They were 
schooled l)y the championship of freedom to love l)etter 
the dear connnon soil, the graves of their lathers, and 
the altars of their religion. 

" They linked their hands, they pledged their stainlesis faith, 
In the dread presence of attestinp: Heaven ; 
They bowed their hearts to sufteritip: and death, 
With the serene and solemn transport given, 
To bless such vows." 

And so has it jjeen to-day, in the uprising of a great 
people to defend their imperilled liberties. The thun- 
der in Charlest(m harljor awoke the mighty millions of 
a free ^^eople, as the dead shall awake at the sound of 
the last trumpet. There Avas something sublime in 
that great uprising, — the hardy legions of the North 
pouring over the tumultuous frontier like the drifted 
flakes of their snow-storms. There is power in the 
elemental agencies of nature ; there is power in the 
whirlwind, in the lightning, in the earthquake; but 
there is something in a nation's uprising, in the electric 
viljrations of aroused patriotism, wtdving over half a 
(•ontiuent, tliat is (piicker than the lightning, more 
portentous than the eartlKpiake. It is when millions 



21 



of men feel on them, all at once, the spell of an 
epochal hour ; when the great bell of human time is 
sounding out another period; when mighty interests 
are at stake, and the destinies of humanity seem sus- 
pended on the action of the hour, — then it is that, 
coming like a visitation, " an unquenchable public 
fire," that breathes and burns electric in every breast, 
the dear name of country becomes a watchword and a 
talisman, thrilling all hearts alike with its troubled 
music, " solemn as death, serene as the undying con- 
fidence of patriotism." Then it is that the siren song of 
peace — peace, when there is no peace — falters on the 
pale lips of fear or treason, drowned by that strain of 
higher mood, the rallying cry of patriotism, — 

"All forward ! all forward ! All forward to conquer ! 
Where free hearts are beating, 
Death to the coward who dreams of retreating ; 
Liberty calls us fi*om mountain and valley ; 

Waving her banners, she leads to the fight. 
Forward ! all forward ! the trumpets are crying, 
The drum beats to arms, and our old flag is flying ; 
Stout hearts and strong hands around it shall rally ; 

Forward to battle, for God and the Right." 

Such an outburst of magnificent and sustained en- 
thusiasm surprised all Europe. But the grandeur of 
our cause is our pledge of triumph. " He ahoays wins 
who sides wath God." There is a conscience behind 
every bayonet. Those banners in the camps, those 
ensigns on the field, are consecrated by the prayers of 



ten thousand sanctuaries and homes. Those bhazing 
campfires are warmed l)y l)ri,iihter memories, that 
flicker around the ingle-fire on many a remembered 
hearthstone. There is not a soklier in tlie ranks 
whose heart is not l)raced by a belief in the goodness 
of his cause. Alivady, a prevision of our triumph has 
seized the Eurt)pean mind. They are beginning to see 
the collapse of the Rebellion. Not long ago they stood 
upon their eastern shore, and thought they saw afar 
the hand that wrote " Upharsin" on Belshazzar s wall, 
writing the doom of our empire. The}' lifted u}) their 
hands, and said, " Upharsin, they are divided !" They 
deemed the disruption inevitable and irremediable. 
I heard them talk in England ; at the lecture, and the 
concert-room, and in the popular assembly. I heard 
the private talk of Englishmen. It was arrogance, 
and bluster, and insufferable conceit. But that was 
two jears ago, Ijefore Grant and Sherman and Sheri- 
dan became the symbols of our era; before the ''Ahi- 
hiiiia, built of English oak, with English gold, manned 
by English sailors, was sent down headlong. Mitli her 
English cannon, to the bottom of the English (,'han- 
nel." 

Out of this baptism of fire, the young Repul)lic shall 
yet lift her head, fairer, more vigorous and puissant 
than ever. These provincial ifags, with their palmetto 
and rattlesnake emljlems, will be rolled up like a 
scroll, and tin- radiant end)lem of our United Anu'rica 
-liall llont on e\er\' liei'jlit, and I)iirn on everv waste 



of sea. With slavery gone, the riv;dries of regions 
will be ended. There will be the mighty minglings 
of minds and hearts, as men shall feel npon them the 
spell of our common history, and lift up their thoughts 
together to the vision of that truer and grander 
America, when all her tribes shall come up to com- 
memorate the great days of her history. I see the 
nation rising from its, present depression, chastened, 
elevated, stamped with the tragic and austere glory of 
the era, reflecting in its newer life the colossal features 
of the continent. After the tempest there shall be a 
calm. The billows shall rock themselves to sleep. 
The golden age shall dawn, with its cattle on a thou- 
sand hills, and its holidays of vintage ; with churches 
sprinkled through the land, and the voice of holy 
Sabbaths mellowing the tones of happy industry. The 
tides of national being shall be again in the ascendant, 
and these glad stars of the morning, once more un- 
dimmed and jubilant, shall hold their eternal courses 
in the sky. 



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